There’s a lot to do as a teacher! My goodness, does the work pile up! The demands on teachers have been increasing in the past decades and there’s such a need to modify and develop new material to meet the needs of our current students, but it can be a nightmare!

Here’s one solution that’s working for a lot of teachers already: Sharing!

There’s so much redundant work that’s being done across the province on the exact same grades and courses. We all feel the need to develop rich tasks, learning activities, and assignments, but it’s so much work! A culture of sharing can make learning and teaching in Ontario a much richer experience.

Being a sharing teacher also requires that you accept that teachers are not educational publishers. They produce a lot of messes. A lot of it is ugly, unfinished, rough around the edges, and missing elements. And that’s OK! Share the mess! Don’t be that student that refuses to hand anything in until it’s perfect. Every teacher will grab material and modify it to fit their own needs; it doesn’t need to be perfect.

Being a sharing teacher doesn’t mean just giving another teacher at your school photocopies of a worksheet or handing them your binder at the end of a year. It means ongoing, inter-board, real-time sharing, as it happens. Sharing ideas, lessons, plans, activities, great finds, but also fears and victories. Sharing digitally also connects you with a wider community of teachers across the province and makes the job even more awesome!

You can share through blogs (including replying to posts), through communities like teachontario.ca, through Twitter (try following your course code hashtag), Facebook and Google+ groups, your own website, and sharing at conferences.

So if you’re willing to take this short pledge, “I will be a sharing teacher,” then, just for fun, you can get the Certificate of Sharing by adding your name and email address here. Don’t worry; I don’t do anything with your email address and it’s only going to me.

You’ll find all of the same help resources as before and more. Click “BrightSpace Resources” above to access all the help files. The French version, A la rescousse, will be added within the next few days.

Be sure to use the Contact Us page (which is really just me) to me know what you think of the new appearance and to suggest new help topics.